1. I wish to thank Frederick K. Keogh and Mariselle Melndez for their comments and suggestions, and Mara E. Villaln for providing me with references published in Venezuela.

2. In this paper I establish a distinction between the theoretical concept of cultural relativism and "partial" relativism. The former, akin to a Weberian "ideal type," assumes that all cultures are equally valid and must thus be understood in their own terms; the latter assumes that people, at the level of actual behavior and practice, support or embrace (or consider equally valid) only some "foreign" cultural elements.

3. Gilij joined the Jesuit Order at the age of 19, in 1740. Having been assigned to the missions of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, in a mission presided over by the renown Father Gumilla, he sailed to America in 1743 where he lived for about 25 years. He studied theology in the Universidad Javeriana en Santa Fe de Bogot, where he resided nearly 6 years. In 1748 he travelled to the Orinoco and in 1749 established la Reduccin de San Luis Gonzaga, known as La Misin de la Encamarada or San Luis de la Encamarada (Gonzlez Oropeza 1989; Salazar 1947).

4. Although several prominent scholars were familiar with Gilij's Saggio, e.g., the naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt and the linguist Lorenzo Hervs y Panduro, a century after its publication the work nearly drifted into oblivion save for its rediscovery by Karl von den Steinen and Lucien Adam (Giraldo Jaramillo 1951; Salazar 1947; Ugalde 1989). This situation is understandable if we remember that Gilij's work was written during a period of political turmoil both in Europe and the Americas, and that, as the political landscape changed when former Spanish American colonies became republics, the work lost relevance (Salazar 1947:255). Even Colombian historians seem to have been unfamiliar with Gilij's Saggio--although Santa Fe is discussed in volume no. 4--until two centuries after its publication, Father Jos Abel Salazar published a study about the work in Spain in 1947 (Giraldo Jaramillo 1951:695).

Writing in the 1950s, Jaramillo (1951:704) reports that Gilij was not even mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britanica, the Catholic Enciclopedia, or the Italian Enciclopedia. Even today, with the exception of a few Orinoquian experts, Gilij's work is poorly known; a remarkable circumstance since the last decade, particularly during the commemoration of the Columbian Quincentenary, has seen a marked increase in the study of travel literature and European and native texts that describe and interrogate the colonial encounter in the Americas. This, of course, cannot be divorced from the paucity of ethnohistorical research in Amazonia.

5. Perhaps, as Sweet (1994:95) suggests, traditional concepts such as "conversion" are taken for granted and manage to persist in the historical and ethnographic literature because scholars inadvertently adopt missionary terminology and conceptual frameworks. This situation may also stem from the fact that devotion to Christianity can easily be presumed when syncretic elements appear in native discourse and practices.

6. For a very brief discussion concerning the features that Gilij's Saggio shares with other travel accounts, as a particular literary genre, see Leon de D'empaire (1989). Leon de D'empaire also addresses Gilij's "middle of the road" posture regarding the debates about the goodness or iniquity of Indians.